Minifigure Collectible Series 28 (possibly Animals) - The Guessing Game

[williejm]

7 hours ago, Karalora said:

I'm not a linguist, but languages develop in response to the experiences of the speakers, and words like "ape," "monkey," and (for example) the French two-for-one "singe" originated well before the Age of Exploration introduced Europeans to the full range of creatures we now know as apes and monkeys. When the only primates known to natural philosophy (not yet "science") are Egyptian baboons, Barbary macaques, and chimpanzees, you might well use the same word to categorize all three. I'm pretty sure that even in English, "ape" and "monkey" were used pretty interchangeably until zoologists started to nail down the differences between them.

To be pedantic about it, "monkey" is a terribly imprecise term--all the creatures we English speakers call monkeys do not comprise a proper monophyletic clade; the ancestors of catarrhines (Old World monkeys and apes) and platyrhines (New World monkeys) diverged as ancestral prosimians and their subsequent "monkeyness" is a case of parallel evolution.

This conversation is happening on a LEGO forum. Pretty wild, huh?

I mean, yes to all of this, but at the end of the day I don’t know how we judge a guessing game in English, unless we have some agreed understanding of the words used?  It would be like us saying contemporary ‘blacksmith’,  ‘barber’ and ‘surgeon’ minifigures were the same because they historically once were. 

Common names for animals are a total crock (just think about US buffalos, elk and robins, named by European settlers already familiar with like species, yet they chose different names 🤪) , and totally yes it’s unfair on those without English as a first language …  aaand it’s also silly because one of the figures we are discussing from the new series is just called ‘fish costume’ which is both wildly unspecific, yet also somehow conjures a generic animal we expect. Yet by any measure ‘fish’ is by far more a diverse group of animals than ‘monkeys’.
 

[Karalora]

1 hour ago, williejm said:

I mean, yes to all of this, but at the end of the day I don’t know how we judge a guessing game in English, unless we have some agreed understanding of the words used?  It would be like us saying contemporary ‘blacksmith’,  ‘barber’ and ‘surgeon’ minifigures were the same because they historically once were. 

That's fair, and to be totally honest in my joy of pedantry I completely lost track of what this thread is actually about! 

[williejm]

16 minutes ago, Karalora said:

That's fair, and to be totally honest in my joy of pedantry I completely lost track of what this thread is actually about! 

You’re just trying to score extra points! Meanwhile I’m mourning the lack of any actual animals (clam notwithstanding) in this series. 😜